Successes and Challenges When Managing Large Scale Drupal Projects
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The document outlines key principles and practices for managing large-scale Drupal projects, emphasizing the importance of agile workflows, regular communication, and effective team management. It discusses roles, processes, and tools necessary to navigate challenges such as multiple stakeholders and maintaining project documentation. The document also highlights lessons learned from past experiences to improve project outcomes.
Successes and Challenges When Managing Large Scale Drupal Projects
- 1. 1 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Chris Urban Manager, Professional Services Large Scale Drupal Projects Successes & Challenges
- 2. 2 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary – Introduction and Background – Walkthrough notes from many large-scale projects – Compare challenges and solutions – Review of Lessons learned Agenda
- 3. 3 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary General Assumptions – Agile Workflow – Iterative development – Scrum or standup – Boards and tickets – Grooming – Planning – Process Management – Scrum Master – Project Manager – Project Evolution – Updates to documentation – Evolving process
- 4. 4 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary – Multiple initiatives – Multiple partners and/or globally distributed teams What makes a project “large scale”?
- 5. 5 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Multiple Product Owners
- 6. 6 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Multiple Stakeholders
- 7. 7 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Getting to be more Agile – Consider Agile workshops – Practice writing user stories – Use sub-tasks and tasks for reminders and non- development based tasks
- 8. 8 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary8 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Regular communication is a key for a successful project
- 9. 9 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Communication/Process – Start with an Agile Workflow and Process – How much is too much? – Additional ceremonies – Release Planning (Product Backlog Refinement) – Backlog Pruning
- 10. 10 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Development Workflow – Clear roles and ownership of states are defined – Changes accounting for BBD testing – Additional states/transitions for larger clients needed
- 11. 11 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Daily Scrum – Worked on, Working on next – Blockers, requests for Discussions – Work/life balance or Temperature score – Larger groups = longer standup calls – Automate and focus on what’s important
- 12. 12 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Sprint Planning – Serves as marker in time and common starting point – Sprint Priorities – Key Feature Summaries – Measure Results absolutely
- 13. 13 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary13 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Good Team Management is a key for a successful project
- 14. 14 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Working with delivery teams – central ticketing if possible is ideal – creation of tickets in JIRA via email – creation of tickets in JIRA in Slack or HipChat
- 15. 15 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Working with Continuous Delivery teams – use a Maintenance backlog team – use a UX bugs and issues team – have developers contribute to a developer backlog and groom and pull in tickets
- 16. 16 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Working with Support teams – Use as infrastructure resource – Accommodate Server upgrades and 404 mitigation
- 17. 17 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary17 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Documentation: takes emotion out of the equation
- 18. 18 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Documentation – Team Contacts and Developers Roster – Sprint ceremonies – RACI – Top level process workflow & expectations – JIRA Workflow and transitions – Spikes vs Tracer Bullets – Hotfixes – Developer documentation
- 19. 19 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Documentation and Process Tips – Confluence – Google Drive – JIRA
- 20. 20 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary20 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
- 21. 21 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Project Level Tools – Google Docs – Confluence – JIRA – GitHub Wiki, Other wikis – Excel, Powerpoint – Email, VOIP – Chat: – Skype – Slack – HipChat – Others: Ryver, Fleep – screenshare/conf call software: – join.me – GoToMeeting – Webex – Zoom
- 22. 22 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Development & Sprint Tools – Planning: – Aha! – Asana/Instagantt – Pointing poker – pointingpoker.com – play.planningpoker.com – Charting - Visio, Omnigraffle, draw.io – Whiteboard - awwapp.com – Acquia Dev Desktop
- 23. 23 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Different tools for different teams? – How are tools used differently with multiple teams/groups/multiple partners? – scheduling – language
- 24. 24 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Worst case scenarios – Sudden client staff changes – Key personnel staff get sick/hit by bus at same time – Client apathy – Client not able to make timely decisions
- 25. 26 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary – Successful teams communicate regularly – Successful teams know who is responsible for what – Successful teams know where to look for answers What did we learn?
- 26. 27 ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary Thank You
Editor's Notes
- #2: Acquia's official PPT template begins here. This is the standard presentation title slide.
- #3: Where were successes made? How were challenges surmounted?
- #6: Having multiple product owners means having to juggle priorities. Who’s tickets are the most important? Does that change from sprint to sprint? How is that communicated, so that everyone knows? Feedback I’ve heard or seen: release planning meeting helped 1:1 meetings with individual product owners Call out inconsistent participation with team Review user story writing Encourage Documentation in JIRA tickets Google Document connected with tickets in draft and under discussion ----- Meeting Notes (11/16/16 22:51) ----- Key to have priorities spelled out ahead of time to make the process as mooth as possible for everyone on the team. Clear communications.
- #7: It is all about managing multiple expectations How is the progress of the project demonstrated and communicated? Do you rely on the product owners to perform this? Do different stakeholders expect different results?
- #8: getting the client to be more agile agile workshops - understanding terminology and general process user stories good foundation block using sub-tasks and tasks for reminders and non-development based tasks
- #10: How can you keep various teams up to date with latest information without burdening everyone with too many "status" meetings? Key elements of the agile workflow we use come with only three key meetings: the daily scrum, review and retrospective
- #11: Automated or Behat testing is more and more critical to a successful project Accommodating this in the development cycle therefore is important Documenting what are the Top level process workflow & expectations JIRA Workflow states – what are the expectations; who watches those states; who is expected to own those tickets (ex. Code Review or QA or UAT)
- #12: Use a tool like Howdy with Slack to automate the daily standup call. Having a large group can drag things down. If necessary, separate scrums by region and rotate responsibilities for a scrum of scrums call or checkin
- #17: Acquia provides customers with Technical Account Managers to help bridge the gap between Delivery teams and Support and often are tasked to handle these kinds of requests
- #19: Who owns tickets in which workflow state Team Contacts and Dev Roster (pivot table for managing distribution lists) Sprint ceremonies: scrum notes, grooming agendas, retrospectives RACI or RASCI Top level process workflow & expectations JIRA Workflow states Spikes vs Tracer Bullets Hotfixes Developer documentation - set aside a timeboxed, small effort ticket to document a feature or Epic as it is near or at completion. Make this a stretch task How to prevent excessive documentation overhead? ----- Meeting Notes (11/16/16 22:51) ----- Make sure to cover grooming agendas for managing multiple product owners
- #20: Confluence – integrates really well with JIRA to make documentation around tickets easier. Prepare documents with automatically updating tables of tickets: listing of all tickets in the last few sprints specific to work around a key Feature. Google Drive – allows for sharing permissions to be different – between teams, clients or everyone on the project For both of these, around grooming – prepare documents linking to tickets in discussion or review In JIRA, create Hidden Epic – specifically designated so that tickets for features that are still congealing or being explored are not accidentally reviewed or sized ahead of their time. Treat like a personal sandbox.
- #23: Pointing poker (pointingpoker.com, play.planningpoker.com)
- #25: ----- Meeting Notes (11/16/16 22:51) ----- Accept, Reject, Accepted with Exceptions
- #28: This is the standard presentation ending slide.